a pseudo-philosophy, the doctrine favoured by most of our recent
physiologists, and of which some of the most eminent of German
metaphysicians have accepted the substance, though refining into a
subtlety its positive form,--I mean the doctrine which Muller himself has
expressed in these words:--

"That innate ideas may exist cannot in the slightest degree be denied:
it is, indeed, a fact. All the ideas of animals, which are induced by
instinct, are innate and immediate: something presented to the mind, a
desire to attain which is at the same time given. The new-born lamb
and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to follow their
mother and suck the teats. Is it not in some measure the same with
the intellectual ideas of man?"[1]

To this question I answered with an indignant "No!" A "Yes" would have
shaken my creed of materialism to the dust. I wrote on rapidly, warmly.
I defined the properties and meted the limits of natural laws, which I
would not admit that a Deity himself could alter. I clamped and soldered
dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page,
to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as the pure formation of
his material senses; mind, or what is called soul, born from and nurtured
by them alone; through them to act, and to perish with the machine they
moved. Strange, that at the very time my love for Lilian might have
taught me that there are mysteries in the core of the feelings which my
analysis of ideas could not solve, I should so stubbornly have opposed as
unreal all that could be referred to the spiritual! Strange, that at the
very time when the thought that I might lose from this life the being I
had known scarce a month had just before so appalled me, I should thus
complacently sit down to prove that, according to the laws of the nature
which my passion obeyed, I must lose for eternity the blessing I now hoped